MOUNT EDEN IN THE PAST.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 147, 23 June 1928, Page 8

MOUNT EDEN IN THE PAST.

Dr. Hochstetter's drawing of Mount Eden, showing an encircling palisade at the foot and remains of palisades on the terraces, aB reproduced in the "Star" from the famous geologist's book on New Zealand, should not be taken as an actual presentment of fact. It was an imaginative sketch intended to show what Maungawhau looked like in ancient days. Hochstetter came to Auckland seventy years ago, travelled considerably about the country and made the first reliable geological examinations of tlfe interior. But all stockading on Mount Eden must have disappeared long before his day. Probably no Maoris occupied the great pa there within the last century and a half, or two centuries; in fact it was deserted, so far as can be learned from tradition, long before Maungakiekie and smaller fortified villages were captured in the Ngati-whatua invasion. The probability is that Maungawhau was about the first large pa scarped and terraced and palisaded on the Tamaki Plain. Hochstetter's drawing shows whares behind the hilltop palisading and also a whare on one of the terraces and two at the foot. These details stamp the sketch as simply an effort to depict the pre-pakeha aspect of the mountain. In the judgment delivered by Judge F. D. Fenton, of the Native Land Court, in the case of the Orakei title in 1869, Fenton said: . . While some of the witnesses tell us of the pas taken and those abandoned, not one speaks of Mount Eden at all, and there is no doubt in my mind that it had been altogether abandoned before Kiwi's time and that it has not been occupied as a pa since." The Kiwi mentioned was Kiwi-Tamaki, the great chief of the Waiohua tribe, whose fortress was Maungakiekie and who was killed in the conquest of these parts by the Kaipara tribes. The date was about the middle of the eighteenth century. Maungawhau was not mentioned in the list of pas taken in that invasion, in which the ownership of the Auckland isthmus passed to Ngati-Whatua. In the well-known legend of Ponga and Puhihuia, told in Sir George Orey's "Polynesian Mythology" and John White's "Ancient History of the Maori," Mount Eden is described as the pa of a large hapu, but the period considerably antedated the historic invasion which swept over the hill forts of Waiohua. —J.C.